Ten Little Indians: Stories

by Sherman Alexie

  “Hello, William,” she said.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above

  DURING THE SUMMER OF 1976, the city of Seattle was beginning to change from the barbarous seaport of loggers, sailors, and Indians it had always been into the progressive, computerized, and sanitized capital of all things Caucasian it would become. I was thirteen and pretty-skinny-beautiful, with eyelashes so black, long, and curly that grown women lost their minds and manners over me:

  “Oh, why do boys always get the gorgeous eyelashes?”

  “I’ll give you a million dollars for those eyelashes!”

  “Hey, Sexy Eyes, why don’t you give me a call when you get legal.”

  “Hello, Benjamin, my name is Mrs. Robinson.”

  “Hey, let’s play Tonto and the Lone Ranger.”

  My crazy aunt Bettina thought all of the female attention was going to make me gay, and though I loved a homoerotic circle jerk as much as the next curious teenage boy, I dreamed almost exclusively about girls and women.

  Rules for Homoerotic Circle Jerks

  Keep your hands to yourself.

  You must open your eyes at least every thirty seconds, and you must keep them open at least thirty seconds at a time.

  No making fun of larger or smaller penises.

  Bring your own tissues for cleanup.

  If you bring pornography, then you must share it.

  You cannot fantasize about the girlfriends of the boys standing next to you, but you can fantasize about the girlfriends of every other boy in the circle.

  You can fantasize about any of the boys in the circle jerk, but not if they are standing next to you.

  An official circle jerk contains seven boys.

  If fewer than seven boys want to jerk off together, they must stand in single file, and it shall be known as a firing line.

  If more than seven boys want to jerk off together, it shall be called a Joint Session of Congress.

  My head was filled with a disassociated and constantly running montage of vaginas and breasts; I was the Andy Warhol of self-imagined adolescent porn. And yes, even at thirteen years of age, I knew about Andy Warhol’s work and found it so completely of its time that I guessed his deconstructive painting of Campbell’s soup cans would eventually be used as a paid advertisement for Campbell’s soup.

  NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: It was my mother who first advanced that particular anti-Warholian theory, and she might have read it first somewhere else. But she is a powerful Indian who reads art-theory books, so I listen to her, and I often agree with her criticism.

  My mother was super smart, and I was smart by osmosis. But she was born smart on the Spokane Indian Reservation and studied her way into the University of Washington during a time when she was pretty much the only Indian on campus, aside from two Snohomish janitors and a Yakama cook at one of the dorms. It’s tough to be a smart girl anywhere, but it’s way tough on the rez.

  Q: What’s the difference between an Indian reservation and a racist, sexist, homophobic, white-trash logging town populated entirely with the mutated children of married second cousins?

  A: The Indians have braids.

  If you think about it, my mother was as heroic as Thor Heyerdahl, Sir Edmund Hillary, John Glenn, or any of those white-boy explorers. My mother broke speed limits, climbed mountains, and sailed oceans nobody else had dreamed up. And she did it all by herself, with one hand holding a textbook and the other hand holding a squealing baby (me!) to her breast. Maybe I’m smart because my mother’s breast milk had little pieces of Albert Einstein and Madame Curie floating around in it. As for my father, he was so long gone that my mother and I called him Long Gone and told each other bedtime stories that always ended with him getting eaten by wild dogs.

  NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: I greatly missed my father and only pretended to hate him as much as my mother did.

  My mother and I lived in a two-bedroom rental house in Ballard, the Scandinavian neighborhood of Seattle. We were poor, but anybody can afford fruits and vegetables, and that’s what we ate. I wasn’t a vegetarian by choice; I was a vegetarian by economic circumstance.

  On July 5 (I remember the exact day because I remember the acrid smell of leftover fireworks smoke), my mother and I were shopping in the local free-range, whole-wheat, lactose-intolerant co-op when she picked up a hand-stapled magazine and self-administered a parenting quiz:

  Do you know the names of all of your child’s friends?

  Do you give your child gender-neutral gifts?

  When your child cries, what color are you thinking of?

  Are you fully clothed, partially clothed, or nude when you breast-feed your baby?

  What are you teaching your child about peace and justice?

  Have you taught your child to play a musical instrument?

  Do you heart-listen to your child?

  Despite her roving and restless intelligence, my mother was the kind of person who believed the garbage she read in magazines. We all have our blind spots, I suppose. She was distrustful enough to write a master’s thesis titled “John F. Kennedy’s Murder: How Rich Men Tell One Lie for Each Dollar They’re Worth,” but she still believed in astrology. She was genuinely shocked and hurt when she caught another human being lying to her, which meant she lived in a constant state of painful surprise, but oh, she would violently punish those liars by screaming surrealistic curses:

  “Your great-grandfather starred in silent porno movies!”

  “Gravity was invented to keep you from realizing your dreams!”

  “Every time you masturbate, you give birth to ten thousand mosquitoes!”

  “I hope Hitler eats your dog in hell!”

  So my mother was naive and vengeful, just like Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, and about 99 percent of all the other famous world leaders you ever heard about. But she wasn’t famous; she was only my mother, and she so miserably failed the parenting quiz that she decided to become my best friend. She never asked my opinion of her parenting skills, but I would have told her this: “Dear Ma; you forgot my ninth birthday, and still to this day have not remembered you forgot it. I’ll probably be presented with a ninth-birthday card on my elderly and senile deathbed. But you’re also the woman who drove me to school during my entire scholastic career, all the way from White Rabbit’s Wonderful Preschool until I graduated from Garfield High School, because it’s pretty darn cute to ride the bus when you’re six years old, but you’re on the Loser Cruiser once you enter the teen years. As a mother, you suffered from a soap-opera style of amnesia (Let’s deal with stressful events by pretending they never happened!) but were critically aware of the Jane Austen-Dinner-Party-meets-Cannibal-Zombies-on-the-Moon social structures of public schools. I truly hated the goofy clothes you wore, which were all sorts of white-hippie-chick-porn-star-Jane-Fonda-in-The Electric Horseman trendy, but you did frame three of my baby outfits and hang them in the front hallway. So I guess you were hopelessly romantic and easily distracted, a B-plus mother, certainly good enough to get into Matriarchal State University but not quite good enough for St. Mary’s College of the Blessed Womb Warriors.”

  But my mother never asked me what I thought of her, and she went crazy after she failed that parenting quiz, and attempted to spend every moment of her waking life with me. She took me to seven baseball games and fourteen poetry readings, and I found both pastimes remarkably similar:

  Am I supposed to clap now?

  Was that a strike?

  Why is he scratching his nuts?

  She took me to folk-music concerts and ballets. Once, during Swan Lake, a secondary ballerina took a wrong turn onstage and smashed into the prima ballerina, sending them both sprawling to the ground. Undaunted, the women jumped back up and resumed dancing, eliciting tremendous applause from the previously sedate crowd (as if they’d only then realized these women were serious athletes and had made a highlight
-worthy recovery), but my mother wept.

  “What’s wrong, Ma?” I asked.

  “That poor woman,” she said. “Her career is over.”

  “No, they’re okay, they’re both okay, look at them dance.”

  “But the young one,” said my mother, weeping so profusely that people around us were getting uncomfortable. “She will never get to dance with the prima again. They’ll punish her. I know it. They’ll make fun of her. They’ll fire her, and she’ll quit dancing and regret it for the rest of her life.”

  “I think you’re overreacting, Ma.”

  “No, no,” she said, so loudly I’m sure the ballerinas heard her. “Don’t you see? Your whole life can be determined by one moment. You make one choice, one mistake, and that’s it. You’ve made the map you’ve got to follow for the rest of your life.”

  “Ma, you’re making a scene.”

  She was always making scenes. She yelled at mothers and fathers who publicly spanked their children (Hey, Mussolini, how would you like me to do that to you?), and commented loudly at any display of public rudeness:

  “Oh, look at Prince Pushy of Monaco, cutting in line. Hey, Prince, do you keep your crown in your ass?”

  “Oh, excuse me, excuse me, Ms. Moneybags, but I see that your party of eight left only a dollar tip for the waitress. I assume that was an honest mistake.”

  “Okay, okay, everybody, listen up, we’re all waiting in line to get our driver’s licenses, but this man here, he’s cursing a lot, so he obviously needs his license more than anybody else in the history of the world. Can somebody please get him a special driver’s license, please, hurry.”

  If she’d been a man and talked like that to strangers, she would have been punched four times a week. How does a self-proclaimed pacifist get herself into so many confrontations? I don’t know; I don’t understand her, not then or now. She’s a contradiction. She has always contained multitudes. But no matter how unpredictable she can be, she fought plenty of justified battles as well. When my elementary school principal, a ROTC pack leader named Wolff (not his real name!), wanted to control my exuberant nature by shoving sedatives down my throat on a highly regular basis, my mother stormed into his office with a bottle of lithium. She poured the pills onto Wolff’s desk, swallowed one dry, and then told Wolff it was his turn.

  “I figure if we’re going to give my kid a narcotic,” she said, “then we both should know how it will make him feel.”

  The Wolff-Man never mentioned pills again. And my mother never told anybody (not even me) her lithium pills were only aspirin. I discovered it only when I took one of the pills and expected to see a life-altering vision but felt nothing except pain relief.

  That was my mother: fierce and protective, open and permissive (No, don’t call it your wang-doodle, it’s your penis), and a total embarrassment.

  “Ma,” I yelled at her. “Why can’t you ignore me sometimes, like all of the other moms and dads? Why can’t you just give me a pair of scissors and tell me to run, boy, run?”

  She sat me down once a week and gave me sex advice:

  “Condoms make you less sensitive, and you’ll last much longer, thereby giving your partner a much more pleasurable experience.”

  “If you spend an hour kissing every part of your lover’s body while purposefully ignoring her orifices, then she will feel more like a holy woman and less like a pincushion.”

  “Make her laugh while making love, and she will love you forever.”

  Yes, I admit my mother’s sexual advice was outstanding, but what son wants to hear these things from his mother?

  “Ma, you’re going to kill me,” I shouted.

  “I understand your anger,” she said.

  She “understood” everything because she bought self-help books that taught her how to understand the teenage male ego. She understood my rage, my volcanic need to kick holes in every interior door of the house.

  “I understand your need to physically express yourself,” she said, “so I won’t fix these doors until you find an alternative means of communicating.”

  Man oh man, she talked exactly like that. She negotiated with me as if I were holding twelve hostages at gunpoint.

  But she really started to fall apart when she decided to become a “progressive and whole woman.” I have nothing against progressive and whole women—

  Q: What kinds of men could resent those kinds of women?

  A: Almost all of them.

  —but I was a reflexive and cracked teenage boy. If Estelle had pursued her wholeness by herself, I would have supported her gladly: “Go get whole, Ma, rah, rah, rah, sis, boom, bah, go get whole, Ma!” But since she was my new best friend, I was forced to attend every single one of her wholeness seminars, consciousness-raising workshops, and spiritual discussion groups. Don’t misunderstand me. Even at thirteen years of age, I knew I was a liberal with socialistic leanings and would vote for socialistic liberals my entire adult life (my spouse, Mary, is the information officer for the local chapter of the Green Party), but there’s no boy or man alive who could have survived that summer without serious emotional repercussions.

  At first, the women who pursued wholeness alongside my mother would be uncomfortable with my maleness, even though I was only a boy (nits make lice). But eventually they would forget I was there. My penis and scrotum would become irrelevant (a redundancy?), and I’d listen to women tell their stories for hours; I’d hear their secrets. I was afraid of female secrets then, and I’m even more afraid of them now.

  “Ma, those woman secrets are killing me,” I said.

  “You’re a good listener,” she said, a compliment meant to distract me from the real issue; my mother was a politician; politicians love secrets!

  “But Ma, listen to me,” I said. “I heard this woman today, the one with the bad perm, she said she thinks about sex as often as any guy does.”

  “That was a very honest thing for Betty to say. The whole woman embraces and celebrates her sexuality.”

  “But Ma, what am I supposed to do with that information? If Betty thinks about sex that much, and you think about sex that much, and all women think about sex that much, then girls my age must think about sex a whole bunch, right?”

  “I certainly did when I was your age.”

  “Okay, I’m going to be walking around school looking at all these girls, and I’m going to be thinking about having sex with them. And trust me, Ma, I think about sex all the time. I’m always beating off; I’m like the Denny’s of masturbation, Ma. I’m open twenty-four hours a day, and I can get the Grand Slam special anytime I want. I got bruises on it; I got calluses. And now, when I’m thinking about sex with those girls, when I’m running off to the bathroom to do my business, you’re telling me they’re all thinking about sex with me?”

  “Well, not all of them, son. You’re not that cute. But I would imagine a very healthy percentage of your female peers think about sex with you.”

  “Ma, I’m not supposed to know that! Do you have any idea how dangerous that is to know right now? When I’m thirty years old, I’m supposed to look back at the teen years and say, ‘Man, if I only knew then what I know now.’ Ma, because of you, I know all of it now, so what am I supposed to do with the rest of my life?”

  NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: My early sexual education did not turn me into a sexually precocious teen or promiscuous man. I have slept with seven women, a shockingly average number of lovers.

  Now, I’m no Oedipus, at least not Oedipal enough to warrant an epic poem, but I have to admit that my mother was pretty dang sexy herself (so maybe I could write an Oedipal haiku). She was Spokane Indian and looked the part: cheekbones stretching from there to here, big black hair hanging halfway down her back, a big brown face with spelunkable eyes, a big bosom, wide hips, and a flat ass. I looked exactly like her, except for the big bosom. If we lived on the reservation, we’d be only two more Indians. But we lived in the city, so naturally, we had a lot of white frie
nds. Most of our friends were white, in fact, but it wasn’t like I spent much time worrying about it. Who cares, right? But my mother started hanging around these white women who were so white I could see through them. They weren’t literally translucent, but they engaged in activities that were so damn foreign to me (so dang Caucasian) that it made me feel lonely as hell. The Title IX legislation was beginning to gain real momentum, and these women knew it, so they were voracious, ambitious, and ready to beat the crap out of the patriarchy. They were in training for the upcoming war! Good for them! I love and respect women! Given the chance, I’ll vote for the Equal Rights Amendment! I’ll be in the Gentlemen’s Auxiliary! If asked, I’ll donate 30 percent of my income to NOW to make up for the 30 percent difference in salary between men and women working the same jobs:

  Community-college history teacher’s salary = $32,525

  $32,525 × 30% = $9,757.50

  Amount of charitable contribution to NOW = $9,758

  My mother’s friends were religious fundamentalists that summer. As women, they’d been “saved” by other women, and now they were preaching and witnessing: “Hear me roar, I am woman!”

  To this day, I rarely look in the mirror and think, I’m an Indian. I don’t necessarily know what an Indian is supposed to be. After all, I don’t speak my tribal language, and I’m allergic to the earth. If it grows, it makes me sneeze. In Salish, “Spokane” means “Children of the Sun,” but I’m slightly allergic to the sun. If I spend too much time outside, I get a nasty rash. I doubt Crazy Horse needed talcum powder to get through a hot summer day. Can you imagine Sacajawea sniffling her way across the Continental Divide? I’m hardly the poster boy for aboriginal pride. I don’t even think about my tribal heritage until some white person reminds me of it: